Summer Reflection

This course has helped me to remember what it feels like to be outside of one’s comfort zone, a feeling that I know every single one of my students experiences at least a handful of times during my class, and often times more. That pressure of having something due on a firm deadline, when I still had no clue as to how to actually do it yet, got my blood pumping academically and I plan on carrying that forward into this year. I want to keep challenging myself and really focus on remembering how challenging most of my students find first year chemistry to be, so that we can work together to find ways to ratchet down the anxiety and grow the love of learning for learning’s sake.

Looking back, the social media piece was hands down the part of our curriculum which made me the most nervous. I entered unsure of whether I could really dive in with an open mind to a world that I’d written off as shallow and not worth my time. Besides the obvious motivation of being required to tweet on the very first day, getting to know the other fellows made me want to see what they were finding as they started their research and share some of the cool things I was finding too. Though important, actually learning to manipulate social media wasn’t too big of a challenge, but ending up really enjoying my own participation in it was a huge surprise. It makes the sharing that good teachers do all the time more efficient. Creativity is often sparked by bouncing ideas off others, leading to hybrids of good ideas that are exponentially better than what may have ever blossomed in isolation (Henriksen & Mishra , 2013).

One other rewarding aspect of this experience for me has been to see and read some educational research that validates many of the pedagogical approaches that I’ve stumbled upon by myself over the past few years of teaching. Many of these approaches have little to do with my understanding of chemistry content and much to do with my understanding of children and teenagers. As I’ve begun raising a family, little parenting tips from my personal life have played out in my class in very beneficial ways. Seeing researchers like Keith Sawyer support the idea that an emotional connection needs to be established before students will trust you enough to be vulnerable and improvise sketches about molecules in front of not just you, but the whole class was important for me. It felt validating to see that other education professionals have seen the power of taking time in class to really build a loving, fun and emotionally safe atmosphere where everyone understands they will both be respected and be expected to return that respect to others. Having this type of atmosphere has also allowed me to be at ease with myself and be more open to changing my plans than I was earlier in my career. I’ve actually felt guilty about this trend sometimes until this course, thinking that I must have failed at anticipating where the specific lesson might go. So, reading Sawyer’s support for the kind of improvisational role play and analogy creation group work I tend to do in my class was quite a relief:

“In particular, effective classroom discussion is improvisational, because the flow of the class is unpredictable and emerges from the actions of all participants, both teachers and students. Several studies have found that as teachers become more experienced, they improvise more (Berliner & Tikunoff, 1976; Borko & Livingston, 1989; Moore, 1993; Yinger, 1987).” - Sawyer, 2004 p. 13

During these past few short weeks, I’ve also had a prior misconception about using technology in the classroom happily shattered. In my previous professional development regarding methods for using technology in a science class, it’s always felt forced. I’ve ended up choosing to primarily focus on students and content, inserting small technology pieces where I thought it made sense, because doing so could permit new learning experiences or data collection. Again, I’d felt guilty about these choices, and now I don’t! When the College Board representative comes in this year to show me how I can switch my entire curriculum over to their online test preparation question bank or when Vernier emails me a list of thirty experiments I can do with their probeware (instead of just the two that make sense for my class), I’m not going to spend a moment fretting about it. Will I continue to keep my eyes open for awesome new places that technology could add to my course? Absolutely, but I’ve learned to see that technology is only a third of the three legged TPACK stool. My love of chemistry and my problem-solving about how best to engage my students as individuals and a class community with chemistry can and should continue to play a starring role in my instruction too (Kereluik, Mishra, Fahnoe, & Terry, 2013).

Throughout the two weeks of face to face instruction, I’ve marveled at the openness with which the instructional team orchestrated our activities. Having a contest to catch as many mistakes as possible…. very clever. This idea of encouraging feedback throughout the lesson or unit, instead of only at the end caught my attention. I plan on incorporating student feedback throughout the whole design loop whenever possible and trying to let go of my instinct to get it all absolutely perfect the first time around. Until now, I’ve used student feedback more formally as end of activity surveys and I’m hoping that by being more welcoming to student ideas about some of my new initiatives, their rollout will be smoother, more effective and less stressful.The biggest new project I’m going to pursue is the creation of a mobile app game that helps students learn the names, symbols and charges of the sixty essential common ions used in our class. For example, students need to know that carbonate is CO3- and vice versa. Taken one at a time, this may not seem hard, but having tried many approaches over the years, I’m still not satisfied with my strategies for helping students confront this large memorization task. In addition to building a better foundation about why students need to learn them, I’m hopeful that giving students a new tool they can use on their own time will be a huge help.

The reasoning behind my choice of a video game is that it gives players high levels of interaction with immediate feedback (Sykes, 2013), both of which are widely agreed to be best practices for teaching new language acquisition (Sams, 2011). Depending on my skill at creating a fun design, hopefully students will become more goal oriented about this task, trying to reach certain levels or earn certain prizes in the game, etc. If (and it’s a big if because I’ve never done any coding before) I’m able to create this game, I’m certain that it won’t make matters worse. I’m aiming to make it as addictive as other popular mobile games that students spend so much time playing. I’m intentionally avoiding any urges to make it an all-encompassing chemistry educational support tool. A simple, but fun and effective digital ion playground is more what I’m going for to support my students’ efforts to learn what is essentially a new alphabet in the science language we’re all investigating together (Sykes 2013).Other avenues that I’m interested in pursuing this year in my attempt to learn from foreign language teaching pedagogy include investigating ways I’d feel comfortable incorporating more peer grading into class. I’ve avoided it almost entirely for fear of cheating, because in my school culture this is an extremely real danger. I believe this is a bridge I must cross however in my hopes of approaching my teaching from a holistic communicative language teaching approach, which attempts to involve students in every aspect of the classroom culture (Kleinsasser 2014). In this same vein, I plan to continue build upon my initial success last year in making lab skills part of my final exam. By instituting a lab practicum students are actually doing the skills they learned in lab that semester to collect real data that is assessed, instead of just answering questions about lab skills. Moving forward into this year, I will need to refine the implementation of this activity.

In summary, this experience has not only reinvigorated my teaching, but confirmed some of my core beliefs about teaching that have led me to important instructional choices thus far in my career. In addition, it’s opened up a new world of possibilities for providing innovative technological support to my students, involving students in more aspects of my instructional planning and development process, and sharing ideas through social media. Underlying all of this pedagogical intent is the belief that the science classroom is and should always be a place to discover some of the wonders our universe has to offer.